


Vauxhall Bridge

by Sherloqued



Category: London Spy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-23
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-07 00:48:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14069259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sherloqued/pseuds/Sherloqued
Summary: Danny is determined to find out what has happened to Alex, and to know that he was not wrong about him.





	1. Chapter 1

_Okay.  Why don't I just lie down and die right now_ , he thought.  It all seemed so frightening and insurmountable.  Whatever it was Alex, or Alistair, was involved in.  At the exclusive gentleman's club that would never have had Danny Holt as a member under ordinary circumstances, Scottie had translated for him the cryptic message from a former associate they met there.  That not only was the MI6 involved, but the American CIA, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure of France, the Russian SVR, the Mossad, and several others Danny was unfamiliar with.   Scottie had told him to affect an air of boredom, but he was not practiced enough.  In his own sphere, the Vauxhall clubs where he held sway were like the ones where he had met Rich, the record producer he had become friends with, who had thought him beautiful one night and picked him out of the crowd; and from then on, he never had to wait in line.   But he realized none of that made him happy anymore.

But a spy?   Danny could scarcely believe it.

One Secret Service outfit was bad enough, but all of them?  It was tempting to just bolt the door to his flat and give up, as he had been warned to.  Or had he been?   It was all making him understandably paranoid.  But he could not give up.  In his romantic, intuitive soul, he knew there was something there worth holding on to.

They were so very different.   He was a warehouse stock boy who lived to party; Alex was a grey-suit wearing investment banker whose work was his life.  Danny never made plans further ahead than a night; Alex's life had been planned since childhood -  the right schools, the right sort, right down to his perfectly arranged files and sock drawer.   Alex went for a morning run without fail; Danny was a chainsmoker, the only time he'd gone for a morning run was to try to help fate along by instigating a second meeting with Alex, at the Vauxhall Bridge where they first met.  An unlikely pairing.  But looking at him from across the table at the restaurant at breakfast the next morning, he had found it difficult to concentrate on anything but Alex's beautiful lips as they talked.  Danny had only wanted to find the real thing, like anyone else.  The eternal optimist.  _Maybe that was a quality that they both shared_ ; he was beginning to find out, and he was relieved, and overjoyed,  to know now that Alex had not lied to him, at least about everything.


	2. For [Your] Eyes-Only

Scottie rang him on his mobile. 

"There will be a note." he told him, too calmly.   _What?  A note for what?_

Danny did not understand.   But he would have been surprised and shocked to find that Scottie's glove-wearing taxi driver was the same man as had taken Danny to the hotel to meet the informant, when he was asking questions about Alex.   He would have even remembered the taxi's number.  Danny would examine the note carefully for any clues to Scottie's death; which he did not believe for a moment was a suicide.

Scottie had been a good friend to him; friend, mentor, father figure.   Danny had had no one, and there was a time when it had been the same for Scottie.  He knew that on some level, Scottie might have wanted more from him, to love him as a romantic partner, but had been much too decent to push it, and seemed satisfied enough with Danny's friendship, and if the relationship should fall out of balance because of Danny's neediness, dropping by unannounced once too often, and although Danny was welcome any time, Scottie had said, he had no problem telling Danny so - which Danny appreciated.  He would never want to take advantage of his friend.  But now, it seemed Scottie had to pay the price for his divided loyalties.   He had sacrificed everything for Danny.  Or had he been the good spy all along, and just could no longer continue with the ruse?  When Danny saw him like that at the Heath, at the end, he sank to the ground, his body heaving with deep sobs.

He occupied his days after that speculating about the activities of the residents of the building across the street, looking out over the rubbish bins below and into the opened windows, when the blinds were raised, as to whether or not he was being surveilled by them from the confines of a safe house.

Even Claire now encouraged him to put it all behind him, after the funeral.  

"When you're ready," she said, "I'll be here."   Which Danny understood her to mean that he should pick up with his own studies and move forward, as Scottie and probably even Alex would have wanted him to do.  "Talent but no drive", or "ambition but no conviction" were assessments he'd heard all his life.   

Was he going to be content to navigate through life like sonar though water?  

He moved from the cramped little flat that he shared with several other students into Scottie's home now, driving there in Scottie's classic blue Jensen C-V8 sportscar.   His flatmates Pavel and Sara both hugged him and wished him well, and thought it would do him a world of good.

  

 

 

 


	3. Frances

On the train to the countryside, on the way to visit the country estate that was Alex's boyhood home, Danny stared out the window. At Scottie's place, he'd finally fallen into the comfort of the deep, fathomless sleep that had eluded him for so long, and he was beginning to feel much better, rested.

He'd not liked her at first, Alex's adoptive mother. She was abrasive and untrusting; distant.  It was only later that he realized how much he admired her quiet fierceness, and that it was she, of them all, who was the one who would have the strength, social connections and the wherewithal to not only to cultivate Alex's talents and intellect as a young boy, but to protect him and ultimately find out what had happened to her son.  She would have made a better spy than her husband, and being relegated to the background planning cocktail and dinner parties simply because she was a woman certainly would have left a bitter taste.  Alex's biological mother was only through accident of birth, and she couldn't give him what Frances and Charles could, except for love, which Frances had said was overrated; although she had taken the young family into her home.  Frances and Danny actually had more in common than he would have originally thought, since they both loved Alex.

Tall and elegantly slender, she had picked him up at the railway station in a Land Rover wearing jeans and a heavy roll-neck jumper and quilted vest, and Wellington boots, as if she had just come from working in her beloved gardens.

"Beautiful countryside you have here." he told her, trying to make conversation as the vehicle bumped along the country roads, but it truly was beautiful.


End file.
